Grand Challenges

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May 8, 2014 |
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VolTA previews the proceedings of the conference on Grand Challenges, a new journal covering responsible innovation and a report from the Rathenau Instituut that shows how technology is getting right under our skins.

Proceedings from the PACITA 2013 Conference in Prague

Mankind has never before dealt with such an enormous quantity and intensity of life changing technologies. The European Technology Assessment Conference that took place in Prague in March 2013 shed a light on many of these grand challenges. In its 22 sessions, it became clear there should be a specific form of TA; one which is open to the general public. In the first keynote speech Wiebe Bijker spoke of how we must make TA about democracy: the state must return from its neoliberal retreat and become an advocate of democratic governance. Stefan Boeschen calls TA an important building block of the democratic culture. Rut Bízková mentioned smart infrastructure as a prerequisite for sustainable competitiveness. But symbols of trust and ethical values are essential for TA. The diversity of languages and lack of unified politics are just the most visible obstacles: cross-European TA must address tension that can arise between different national and regional structures. It’s a need that is clearly manifested in all the contributions to these Proceedings, which will be available online in May 2014.

Journal of Responsible Innovation

The new Journal of Responsible Innovation (JRI) offers humanists, social scientists, policy analysts and legal scholars, and natural scientists and engineers an opportunity to articulate, strengthen, and critique the relations among approaches to responsible innovation, thus giving further shape to a newly emerging community of research and practice. These approaches include ethics, technology assessment, governance, sustainability, socio-technical integration, and others. JRI intends responsible innovation to be inclusive of such terms as responsible development and sustainable development, and the journal invites comparisons and contrasts among such concepts. JRI is open to alternative styles or genres of writing beyond the traditional research paper or report, including creative or narrative nonfiction, dialogue, and first-person accounts, provided that scholarly completeness and integrity are retained.

Intimate technology

Smart phones, social media, cameras and biosensors mean more and more information about our bodies and behavior are becoming digitally available. Our lives are increasingly becoming intertwined with technology. But allowing technology into our private worlds collides with the most crucial issues of our humanity. It leads to a struggle for our intimacy. The Rathenau Instituut has called this the intimate-technological revolution. This report highlights how the application of human-like technology, such as digital coaches, realistic avatars and robots are blurring the boundaries between humans and technology even further. Important ethical questions touch on the basic rights and dignity of people, their right to privacy, physical and mental integrity, the right to live in a safe environment, the right to have private property, and freedom of thought and conscience. Governments and private companies want our data in order to create profiles and influence our behavior. Technologies with human features, such as digital coaches, realistic avatars and robots yield the ability to influence human behaviour. How can we avoid being manipulated? Which social tasks can we humanely delegate to machines, and which not? What autonomy do we wish to keep?

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volTA magazine

volTA was a magazine on Science, Technology and Society in Europe, initiative of fifteen technology assessment organisations that worked together in the European PACITA project aimed at increasing the capacity and enhancing the institutional foundation for knowledge-based policy-making on issues involving science, technology and innovation. It was published between 2011 and 2015 in 8 numbers.